<p>The US Supreme Court ruled in favor of Monsanto Monday over an Indiana farmer accused of having pirated the genetically-modified crops developed by the agribusiness giant.</p>
<p>The high court was unanimous in its decision, ruling that laws limiting patents do "not permit a farmer to reproduce patented seeds through planting and harvesting without the patent holder's permission."</p>

Executive Summary Unlawful immigration and amnesty for current unlawful immigrants can pose large fiscal costs for U.S. taxpayers. Government provides four types of benefits and services that are relevant to this issue: Direct benefits. These include Social Security, Medicare, unemployment insurance, and workers’ compensation.Means-tested welfare benefits. There are over 80 of these programs which, at a cost of nearly $900 billion per year, provide cash, food, housing, medical, and other services to roughly 100 million low-income Americans. Major programs include Medicaid, food stamps, the refundable Earned Income Tax Credit, public housing, Supplemental Security Income, and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families.Public...

American investment banks dominate global finance once more. That’s not necessarily good for America FOR a few tense weeks in 2008, as investment-bank executives huddled behind the imposing doors of the New York Federal Reserve, Wall Street seemed to be collapsing around them. Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy, Merrill Lynch collapsed into the arms of Bank of America. American International Group (AIG) and Citigroup had to be bailed out and the rot seemed to be spreading. Hank Paulson, the treasury secretary at the time, recalled in his memoir that: “Lose Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs would be next in line—if...

ANKARA, Turkey — Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a critical U.S. ally in the Muslim world, is struggling with the crisis in Syria, which has strained his country’s fast-growing economy, swamped it with hundreds of thousands of refugees and created unusually public friction with Washington. The urgency of Erdogan’s concerns over Syria was underscored by Saturday’s car bombings that killed 46 people in the Turkish border town of Reyhanli, where thousands of Syrian refugees have taken shelter. Erdogan’s government blamed the blasts on the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad — an allegation that Syrian officials quickly denied. snip

Turkish Hattat Holding and China-based Harbin Electric International signed a deal to build a coal-based power plant in northwestern Turkey on May 10. The plant is planned to have a capacity of 2,640 megawatts (MW) in total. Around $2.4 billion will be invested in the project, Hattat Holding Chairman Mehmet Hattat said at the signature ceremony. Hattat Holding had been in talks with a number of Chinese, South Korean and Westerns firm to build a new coal-fired thermal power plant in the region for a while. The Harbin Electric International Project Director expressed his satisfaction with the deal. “We produce...

Joe Biden endorses a tax on blood and goreTaking legal advice from Joe Biden is dangerous, like taking his tips on home defense. The vice president who urges the ladies to deal with intruders by firing a shotgun at the dark now says there’s no “legal problem” with imposing a violence tax on movies and video games. Mr. Biden endorsed the idea, proposed by the Rev. Franklin Graham at a White House meeting to plot strategy for enacting the president’s gun legislation. A sin tax would be imposed on video games such as “Call of Duty” and movies such “Django...

Turkey is closer to coming to an agreement over joint energy projects with Israel, according to a report on Friday in the Turkish daily Today’s Zaman. The recent natural gas discoveries off Israel’s coast led to a discussion over how to best transfer the gas to Europe. The paper quotes top Turkish officials as stating they are moving to be in favor of “extensive cooperation” with Israel and Cyprus. Turkish President Abdullah Gul and Energy Minister Taner Yildiz were said to have discussed the issue on Friday at an energy conference in Istanbul. Gul said at the conference that Turkey...

Everyone knows that a weak yen is good for Japan’s big exporters like Toyota. Plot a chart of the exchange rate and the car-maker’s share price and the lines are barely distinguishable, so great is the correlation between the two. What’s more interesting to me is whether the flip side of this trade, dollar strength, is more than a short-term blip. The dollar has been falling against a basket of other currencies for 10 years now. If that process has run its course and the dollar is stabilising or even set to appreciate again, that could have big implications for...

<p>The Supreme Court unanimously ruled on Monday that farmers may not use Monsanto’s patented genetically altered soybeans to create new seeds without paying the company a fee.</p>
<p>The ruling has implications for many aspects of modern agriculture and for businesses based on vaccines, cell lines and software. But Justice Elena Kagan, writing for the court, emphasized that the justices meant for the decision to be narrow.</p>

Daily investment & finance thread (5-13-13 edition) ---- Freepers lets make some cash Trying to focus on the markets for today and each day and the economic news This is where you can impart some investment wisdom to your fellow freepers. You can complain about the big one that got away. How Obama is out to wreck American capitalism.If you see another FR economic thread you like and want to link to it here, please do Post your favorite economic site links. Your favorite economic blogs and precious metals blogs and sitesApmex.com is a solid place with good reputation to...

Florida's $9 billion orange crop, the largest in the world after Brazil's, may not survive an incurable disease that threatens to wipe out citrus groves throughout the United States. The disease, known as "citrus greening" or huanglongbing, is caused by a bacterium, Candidatus Liberibacter asiaticus. The bacteria are spread from tree to tree by a tiny insect called the Asian citrus psyllid, The New York Times reports...

Despite suffering the most humiliating rejection of his presidency, President Obama and the liberal establishment are determined to revive their failed gun control scheme. That’s a good thing. The Republicans should remember Napoleon’s warning that you should never interrupt an enemy when he is making a mistake. This mistake will cost the Democrats dearly in 2014. We need to understand that the motivation behind the gun grabbing campaign has always been more than just naked political calculation. Certainly, liberals think it will help motivate their base and maybe shore up the squishy suburban mom demographic for 2014, but this is...

Being president was always easy for Barack Obama. That is, it was easy up until the time he actually wasÂ elected president. Then things got a little tougher. In part, Obamaâ€™s troubles stem from the rigidity of his broken ideas. They admit of no compromise. Consequently, he has subsumed his whole personality into an unworkable ideology that was dead outside of academia- and news rooms- until he resurrected it. Itâ€™s the idea that a benign government of technocrats and academics can engineer near perfect justice at the trivial cost of liberty to most.Â His life and presidency can only be understood...

Barbara Walters is saying goodbye to TV journalism. After more than half a century in the industry, the veteran ABC News anchor plans to retire next summer, an ABC spokesperson confirmed to The Times on Sunday night. Walters, 83, is set to make it official Monday morning on “The View.” And the network plans to make good use of her while it can. The legendary TV personality will continue to anchor and report for ABC as well as continue to appear on “The View” and anchor specials throughout the year.

Following up on last week’s piece detailing the reasons why the Shale oil and natural gas boom has taken place in Texas, but not in other states like California and New York, we’ve seen quite a bit of interesting, related news pieces over the last several days. On Monday, the Wall Street Journal published a very informative op/ed in its Review & Outlook section, titled “A Tale of Two Oil States”, which made more detailed comparisons between the economic performance between Texas and California, and the ways in which each state’s policy decisions related to shale development have affected that...

Saudi Arabia signaled that it intends to remain a world energy powerhouse for the foreseeable future, partly by exploiting new technology which has unlocked vast quantities of oil and natural gas in North America. ... “We have rough estimates of 600 trillion cubic feet of unconventional shale gas. The potential is very huge and we plan to exploit it,” he said during a Credit Suisse conference. Mr. al-Naimi didn’t say how quickly Saudi Arabia might begin commercial production of shale gas or shale oil, or describe how it will supply the large amounts of water used in hydraulic fracturing or...

“Decent folks who believe in tolerance and equality are no longer powerless against Limbaugh’s efforts to spread intolerance on the radio. StopRush is making a major impact by convincing advertisers on this show to withdraw their ads — and with your help we can do even more. Just a few e-mails, tweets or Facebook messages a week to Limbaugh’s advertisers can go a long way toward making hatred less profitable. It is our collective voice that makes us strong.” — DailyKos.com, promoting the “StopRush” campaign. Absolutely right! If you believe in tolerance and equality, the thing you really need to...

Corruption determined to not be an obstacle to taxpayer moneyMillions of children will be targeted to improve their reading skills over the next five years under a new Obama administration literacy program in nearly 30,000 public and private primary schools. But the schools are not in the U.S., they’re in the Republic of Kenya. The tentatively titled Kenya Early Grade Reading Project, or KEGRP, seeks to implement national curriculum standards, deploy more than 1,000 trainers to assist tens of thousands teachers and improve the ratio of textbooks to students. The Obama administration didn’t reveal the cost of the program.

How many of you have flower or vegetable gardens at your home? I know many people are growing their own herbs to use for cooking as well as indoor and outdoor vegetable gardens. Others have flowers in pots, window boxes, hanging baskets, in flower beds and outdoor gardens.My wife and I have a number of vegetables and fruit growing outside which include apples (2 varieties), beans (purple and wax), broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cantaloupes, carrots, cherries, cucumbers (bush), grapes (5 varieties), onions (red), peas (green and snap), potatoes (3 varieties), sage, radishes, tomatoes (6 varieties), and watermelons (3 varieties). We also...

I couldn't help thinking that Obama and his speechwriters were responding to what they'd read in the New York Times a week before. In "For Millennials, a Tide of Cynicism," the Times reported new polling data from Harvard's Institute of Politics suggesting that Americans under the age of 30, "who turned out in droves to elect Mr. Obama in 2008, are increasingly turned off by politics. Experts fear their cynicism may become permanent." If so, that's pretty good news, because those mysterious "voices" are on to something. In 2007, candidate Obama even told a group of supporters: "One of the...